Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I picked this one up early on, but for some reason I didn’t dig into it right away. I can’t place a finger on the reason for that, but I will say I’m glad I picked it up. This book is a great ride. Spoilers ahead~

I’m not normally a big fan of zombie horror. It doesn’t bother me the way it does some, but I also have never found zombies to be particularly scary as a monster type. As with any zombie story I’ve seen, the real monsters and the true horrors are the humans.

As I started reading Jane’s story I thought this could be a fine action story set around the time of the Civil War. As it turns out there is a lot of action, but not in the sense I was thinking. This was certainly NOT the Harry Potter-esque life at a boarding school adventure type. The model of the school Jane attended was the Carlisle school, albeit slightly time shifted. This was racism and the blatant attempts of one group of people trying to keep another group of people down. The school, the treatment of the people and way they were expected to behave was just the starting point for the monsters.

The teachers at the school practiced the sort of abuse that wasn’t just physical. True to abusers everywhere there was psychological abuse riding hand in hand. Early in the story I wanted to see Jane make some move to solve the mystery of the missing family and give the school some sort of “comeuppance” that would allow for some kind of happy ending. I failed to see the problem with that line of thinking right away, but the author deftly moved to remedy the situation by wiping out not just the school, but the entire state of Maryland.

Taking Jane and her friends west into the plains removed any sense of East Coast familiarity from me and placed them all squarely in the path of the most monstrous people in the whole book – the self righteous. Using religion as a bludgeon to maintain the oppression of a people stoked the ugly feelings toward those opposed to Jane. I was sincerely glad when that town was wiped out and Jane’s little band made their escape. The writing here was really wonderful. It’s good writing when you loathe a fictional man that much.

I’m glad the main aspects of the story wrapped up in the first book. The history of each character and development of the world was excellent. The “cliffhanger” for the continuation of the story is there as Jane is in the middle of the prairie, but I do consider the story of the first book wrapped up. I could leave it at that if I wanted, but I suspect I’ll be going out and grabbing up the next book.

I hadn’t realized that I had subconsciously bought into the “that’s how things are” feeling of the way the schools were set up at first. I had to step back at the end and realize just how messed up that was. I’m glad the author put the reading recommendations at the end of the novel and I’d like to add one of my own (since I’m being so bold). For anyone sports minded it’s worth picking up Carlisle Vs. Army, a story about some of the athletes from the school in question and how they helped to shape the modern sports world.

Definitely recommend picking this book up.



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